I ran across a summary of a report from a Los Angeles based non-profit group called the Advancement Project (www.advancementproject.org/) on the Public Education Network (PEN) “NewsBlast” (for February 26, 2010) that comes out every several days. Their white paper is titled “Intertwined policies cause widespread alienation & worse” and can be viewed and or downloaded at www.advancementproject.org/digital-library/publications/test-punish-and-push-out-how-zero-tolerance-and-high-stakes-testing-fu.

From the PEN summary of the report I read…

A new report from the Advancement Project examines the joint effects of zero-tolerance discipline and high-stakes testing, which in it its view derive from the same ideological roots that have “turned schools into hostile and alienating environments for many of our youth, effectively treating them as drop-outs-in-waiting.”

This is the concern expressed by many alternative educators for years (particularly since Clinton’s Goals 2000 and its Bush/Kennedy successor, No Child Left Behind) but rarely heard from either liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans.

I took just a peek at the Advancement Project’s web site to read their basic statement of who they are and their mission…

We are an innovative civil rights law, policy, and communications “action tank” that advances universal opportunity and a just democracy for those left behind in America. We believe that sustainable progress can be made when multiple tools—law, policy analysis, strategic communications, technology, and research— are coordinated with grassroots movements.

Apparently the Advancement Project was founded in 1999 in Los Angeles and Washington DC by veteran civil rights lawyers who were looking for new ways to dismantle structural barriers to inclusion, secure racial equity, and expand opportunity for all.

Continuing with the PEN summary, the report finds…

While the increased securitization of schools is disaffecting for many at-risk students, “the emphasis placed on test results above all other priorities has an alienating and dehumanizing effect on young people, who resent being viewed and treated as little more than test scores.”

They are speaking of a disconnect between the humanistic values we strive for in our adult society and would hope to impart to our youth, and also hope to be reflected in our society’s institutions on the one hand, and the reality of at least in some (many) of our schools, particularly in more at risk communities. I can recall from my own kids’ experience in public schools the constant ranking of test scores and grades and boiling a young human being down to an “A Student” or “C Student” etc. My kids were in school to learn about areas of knowledge of interest to them, not to be constantly evaluated, particularly in such a reductionist way.

The PEN summary goes on to say that the organization’s report also…

Finds that the end result of “these intertwined punitive policies” is a “school-to-prison pipeline,” in which students throughout the country are “treated as if they are disposable, routinely pushed out of school and toward the juvenile and criminal justice systems.”

The report cites statistics showing a dramatic rise in school-based arrests coinciding with the passage of NCLB. Almost 250,000 more students were suspended out-of-school in 2006-07 than just four years earlier, when NCLB was signed into law, an increase of 15 percent. Giving schools the benefit of the doubt, maybe the increased focus on academic achievement in at-risk schools brought more attention to students who were disruptive and not going with the program, likely much more prescriptive and laser focused on improving reading and math skills for the high-stakes tests.

The issue that jumps out at me with my focus on “many paths”, is that if the standard instructional approach or standard curriculum does not work for a particular youth (like it did not for my son Eric), a mostly one-size-fits-all array of public schools does not give that kid’s family any real choices on where this “fish out of water” can find a more appropriate learning environment. Maybe the youth would do better in a venue that was more experiential and real-world than academic.

But with the one-size-fits-all mindset of many school districts, the “fish out of water” kid is simply “lazy”, “unmotivated” or “disruptive”. Since there are no real alternative paths available, the bureaucracy does not want to acknowledge that a particular school could be an appropriate learning environment for some students but not for others. Also if the conventional wisdom prevails that the only kind of meaningful formal education is the teacher administered, standards-based instructional kind, then it may be way to far outside the box for the adult school staff to even go there.

And finally from the PEN summary …

These policies have become mutually reinforcing the report argues, changing the incentive structure for educators, “putting many teachers and administrators in the unenviable position of having to choose between their students’ interests and their own self-interest.”

What a problematic model for cooperation and collaboration between youth (student) and adult (teacher). The teacher is the agent of a state-designed and state-directed institution that is committed to serve all students, whether or not this particular educational setting is appropriate for all those students.

From meeting my daughter Emma’s ninth-grade teachers and hearing her anecdotes about what happened in class, I could see the teacher’s difficult juggle between getting the students proficient on a pre-fabricated curriculum and facilitating a classroom experience that engaged the true interests of the students. When I asked Emma’s math teacher what he did to try to make geometry relevant, he shrugged and shook his head and wistfully said the there was no time for that. Emma’s history teacher said he had stopped class discussions about the more interesting topics in the text, because most of the students were failing the tests. He had them spend class time instead outlining the text chapter they were studying instead, each student working silently and individually at a pretty rote task.

Both those teachers were obviously stressed and unhappy with the situation, but they were muddling through and not rocking the boat. Her geometry teacher was hoping to perhaps retire in another year or two.

My take was (and still is) that real problems with individual people are not solved by bureaucratic solutions developed in faraway venues by people who rely on statistics rather than actual relationships with those individual people. This I see as one of the main shortcomings of the educational solutions put forward by my fellow progressive democrats. Their intent may be humanistic, but their programs are designed and implemented by state (and now even national) bureaucracies, which are unfortunately (by their high degree of separation from the students, families, teachers and administrators affected by those programs) tend to keep pushing the results away from humanistic outcomes, a kind of “Peter Principle” of sorts.